Not familiar with any recent or Nerf stuff...but I certainly remember the "mine is bigger and more macho than yours" squirt gun arms race of the early 1990's.

The 1950's had "mine are bigger and fancier" tail fins on cars.

A whole lotta folks like to imaging that human nature changes over time. Fashions change. Human nature, not so much.

My favorite "example" of this is looking for pictures of "soldiers" or fighters or warriors using a weapon as a penis for a photo/picture/drawing.

We even have instances of that kind of thing in cave drawings! There's something very deep in the male brain that goes "haha long stick is long penis!"

Long stick, big dick!

But also, plenty of means, good genes. You are right, it’s real deep in there.

It’s frustrating when you catch it in your own thought processes! I honestly recall when dating seeing a physically attractive potential partner and thinking “they seem nice”…

Commerical Nerf guns don't even hold a candle to the DIY builds. The easiest type is a muzzle loader that accelerates a weight into a piston. A more advanced one has a rotating drum of muzzles advanced and fired by compressed air.

Apparently these days it's possible build magazine fed nerf guns but most designs require a different sort of Nerf projectile where the suction cap is a smaller diameter than the foam body - otherwise there's no easy way to build a feed system. Back when I was a kid we only had the traditional style.

Culture seeps into toys, and firearms culture is back in a big way in America. I blame the federal assault weapon ban and 9/11 for popularizing the modern tactical firearm community.

> I blame the federal assault weapon ban and 9/11 for ...

Small picture...kinda maybe. Bigger picture - I'd say it's far more due to widespread social / economic insecurity. And the culture wars that a lot of American "leaders" have found it personally profitable to whip up.

For many people who feel insecure - talking about guns, handling guns, firing guns, etc. can provide neurochemical "benefits" that you probably couldn't match with any sort of pill. But the downsides, either over time or at scale, are probably as bad as mass consumption of mood-management substances would be.

Nothing wrong with Firearms culture. Citizens of Ukraine would agree.

>Over the next decade, designers at Nerf, a division of Hasbro, came up with fanciful models shaped like bats, piranhas, and spiders. What they didn’t look like were weapons of war.

While they're definitely more abstractly modeled, I think pre 9/11 nerf look more like Sci-Fi weapons of war than spiders. The Pulsator for example is a pretty close to the Quake nailgun visually and in function, and the arrowstorm similar to the super nailgun. Like the article mentions previously most toy guns were as realistic as possible, like the Entertech water guns from the 80s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa-9Birw74o

No mention of the disruption of the Nerf battlefield?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zO6dmua_B0k

If you have a 3d Printer, buy a hardware kit and plans from Captain Slug on Etsy! I 3d printed a nerf blaster that is _hilariously_ over-powered and super fun!! The process was very informative as I had to tune quite a few printing parameters to get good better tolerances and good exact, rather than relative, output measurements.